Best in Upstate

John Moriello, who has been an ardent follower and commentator on New York high school sports for decades, is writing a weekly column called "Best In Upstate," which is designed to fly above all of the state sectional borders. You can reach John at nysswa@gmail.com or @nysswa on Twitter. He oversees the New York State Sportswriters Association web page of high school rankings.

There are more than 14,000 varsity teams competing in New York State Public High School Athletic Association sports. Without fail, one of them per year will find itself banned from the postseason for violating one of the most basic rules by exceeding the allowed number of regular-season games.

In a really bad year, two teams might find themselves in that bind.

So I found it a bit humorous that the subject of too many games was raised during the same meeting in which the subject of playing too few games was also mentioned Thursday.

The setting was the quarterly New York State Public High School Athletic Association meeting in Saratoga Springs. A fair amount of old business was settled, including a 12-10 vote against compelling all NYSPHSAA sports to abide by the rulebooks of the National Federation of State High School Associations in the day's meatiest matter.

On the other hand, the wheels are still spinning on a topic I wrote about last fall. That was when the New York State Council of School Superintendents informed the NYSPHSAA that it would be receptive to the idea of restoring games to high school schedules that had been whacked in January 2009 as an emergency response to school budget concerns brought on by the Great Recession.

The thinking at the time was that school districts had to cut expenses wherever possible. With a number of districts contemplating wiping out junior high sports altogether, the NYSPHSAA membership decided that chopping between two and four games from most varsity and JV schedules was a more palatable alternative.

School districts have since come to face new challenges such as the 2 percent cap in tax increases, but the money saved by the schedule reductions amounts to little if anything, especially for schools that have found ways to add more scrimmages. Basketball has already clawed back its lost games and I figured that other sports would get back their games in quick fashion once the superintendents organization spoke up.

Unfortunately, the subject is still half a stride behind where I figured it would have been by now. And it appears that the restoration might happen incrementally over a couple of years. That would help districts make whatever actual budget adjustments are needed and also buy a little time for sports and sections already facing a shortage of game officials.

Juxtapose that against where this column started: What to do when a school plays too many games and finds itself barred from its sectional and state tournaments. The question is now in play and will get discussed at the sectional level this spring and summer.

The sequence of events is nearly identical every time a team breaks the scheduling rule: Appeals are made to the section and then to the NYSPHSAA, online petitions get started, court action by parents of the affected athletes commences and the local newspaper writes a factually accurate story followed closely by a tear-jerker editorial — sometimes by someone who barely knows the difference between the electoral college and a community college and even less about sports.

Robert Zayas, executive director of the NYSPHSAA, and Pat Pizzarelli, a veteran coach and administrator in the Lawrence school district on Long Island, are among those sympathetic to the athletes who end up getting punished for adult mistakes. But that has to be balanced against the 99.995 percent of teams that follow the rules.

"The adage is don't hurt kids, but in life people get hurt," said Pizzarelli, a retired AD who serves as a member of the NYSPHSAA Handbook Committee. "Innocent people get hurt because of no doing of their own. And that's what life is. And teaching them to deal with those things, it's a coach's problem and an athletic administrator's problem if that happens. Because they both dropped the ball."

Specifically, the athletic director sits in a mandatory meeting conducted by Zayas in the late summer or early fall and views a Powerpoint refresher course on important NYSPHSAA rules and New York State Education Department regulations — including the importance of not exceeding the maximum number of contests.

Now, however, the NYSPHSAA is asking its membership whether the rule should be changed. The question surfaced this winter among sectional executive directors and then last month in a meeting of the Handbook Committee. It's not as though anyone is racing to change the rule; at the moment it's more a case of asking whether we might have a problem in search of a solution or a solution in search of a problem.

"If you keep everything the same you are never going to make a mistake," Zayas said. "You never try anything new, you never try to improve anything."

I'm not clear whether the discussions started before or after one Long Island school managed to schedule 23 basketball games for what is supposed to be a 20-game season.

One idea that has been floated is to allow an affected team to regain its postseason eligibility by suspending the head coach for the remainder of the season and paying a fine, currently suggested to be $1,000.

The case for offering such an option is obvious, namely that the players currently are made to suffer the consequences of a mistake by one or more adults. The most recent example of the serious implications of carelessness came last October when the unbeaten Lake George girls volleyball team couldn't compete in the Section 2 tournament. School officials contended one of its matches should have been regarded as a scrimmage, but it was clear to everyone else that it was actually a varsity contest.

The appeals often work their way to Zayas' desk. But his role as executive director doesn't allow him to waive NYSPHSAA black-letter law.

"When it happens it's the worst thing for that community, for that school district, for our association and for that entire section," Zayas sad. "The question I ask is does it have to be as restrictive in order to ensure coaches aren't going to purposely violate the rules? And that's what this proposal is. Whether they vote on this proposal or an aspect of it, my question is does it have to be so restrictive in order to have rule enforcement being followed?"

The case against loosening the rule is the perception that it amounts to buying the school's way out of a jam that could have been avoided if the AD had paid attention during the annual mandatory meeting; I've seen the Powerpoint so often now that I can predict when the topic will appear in the presentation, and Zayas even offers a foolproof system each year for avoiding going over the limit.

My line of thinking is that superintendents might be squeamish about laying out any amount of money to restore tournament eligibility even though a number of other state high school associations have fine structures for various transgressions, including the overscheduling issue. But Pizzarelli makes the point that superintendents are so routinely battered by parents that they might be inclined to take the path of least resistance.

"The parents are going to complain to them, 'You're hurting my kid,'" he said.